On Oct. 8, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a package of tenant protection measures including Assembly Bill 1399 by Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica), which will close abusive loopholes in the Ellis Act.  Bloom also co-authored AB 1482 with Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco), which creates a rent cap and provides “just cause” eviction protections statewide.

The Ellis Act gives rental property owners in rent control jurisdictions the right to exit the rental housing market, but also places reasonable conditions and restrictions on landlords in order to avoid unscrupulous use of the bill simply to evict tenants and re-rent one or more units for more money. These conditions include a requirement to notify tenants 120 days prior to withdrawing a unit (or one year for tenants who are disabled or over the age of 62). The act also restricts when owners can re-enter the market, what price they can re-rent units at when they re-enter, and requires that all units in a building be removed simultaneously.  As the housing crisis has driven up the market rate for rental units, some landlords have increasingly subverted the intent of the Ellis Act.

AB 1399 prohibits this conduct by establishing that there can only be one withdrawal date for a property and by clarifying that the date on which the accommodations are deemed to have been withdrawn from the rental market is the date on which the final tenancy among all tenants are terminated. AB 1399’s reforms mandate that wrongfully evicted tenants be offered the opportunity to re-rent their former unit.